Museum of Glass Big Read Program: Bewilderment
EarthSpeak: Immersive Sound and Spoken Word Event
Museum of Glass and Inspiration Lab are partnering to bring you EarthSpeak, a one-hour spoken word and sound experience that draws inspiration from selected themes in Bewilderment, Richard Powers’ 2021 novel that grapples with the climate crisis, extinction, biodiversity loss, and the emotional weight of loving a planet in peril. This event is one of a series of events funded by Museum of Glass 2026 National Endowment for the Arts (NEA) Big Read grant.
EarthSpeak features remembrances, and collective healing through an immersive event that evokes Earth’s voice alongside ancestral wisdom through soundscapes and poetic responses to climate change.
Saturday May 30, 2026 | 6:30-8pm | Free with RSVP!
Performance 6:30-7:30pm | Q&A 7:30-8 pm
Evergreen State College | 1210 6th Ave, Tacoma, WA 98405
Spoken Word Artists: Jourdan Imani Keith, Storme Webber, Jen Moore, and Monique Franklin,
EarthSpeaks Sound Bath: Jennifer Moore
Selected nature sounds: Maluhia Castillo
Meet the Artists
Jourdan Imani Keith
Jourdan Imani Keith, Seattle’s 2019-2022 Civic Poet, is a storyteller, essayist, playwright, naturalist, and activist. Featured in Forbes and on NPR, her Orion Magazine essays "Desegregating Wilderness" and "At Risk" appear in the Best American Science and Nature Writing Anthology, as well as textbooks. Her plays, episodes one and two of "The Uterine Files" were produced by Langston Hughes Performing Arts Institute and the Shattered Glass Project in 2023. The founder of Urban Wilderness Project, she leads its R U An Endangered Species™ and Women and Whales First: Poetry in a Climate of Change campaigns. She is a recipient of the 2022 US Water Alliance Outstanding Artist prize and a 2018 Americans for the Arts award. Her TEDx Talk, “Your Body of Water” became the theme for King County’s 2016-2018 Poetry on Buses. She is the recipient of awards and fellowships from Artist Trust, 4 Culture, City of Seattle, Hedgebrook, Wildbranch, Santa Fe Science Writing workshop, VONA, and Jack Straw.
Storme Webber
Storme Webber is a Two Spirit Sugpiaq/Black poet and interdisciplinary artist. Her work incorporates text, performance, audio/altar installation, archival photographs, curation, and collaborations. Her work can be found in film, theater, archives (The Beineke Library at Yale), museums, recordings, and publications. She was recently awarded a Torchbearer Legend recognition “for her decades of leadership and having created pathways for others.” For decades she has created and curated international cultural projects centering LGBTQ people of color, most recently in Seattle 2007-2024 with Voices Rising: LGBTQ of Color Arts & Culture. Her first solo museum exhibition, Casino: A Palimpsest, was presented at the Frye Art Museum in Seattle in 2017. Minh Nyguyen, Art in America, wrote: “Rather than erect divisions between personal art and historical archives, Casino considered the intangible properties by which art and poetry are connected to family, ancestry, language, and public memory, revealing intergenerational, underground histories of resilience.”
Selected work: “The AMP Project”, Seattle; Smithsonian’s Museum of the American Indian online exhibit of Black Native women artists: “Ancestors Know Who We Are”; the second edition of her book and CD, “Blues Divine” publishes in Spring 2026.
Photo by Will Wilson
Jennifer Moore
Jennifer Moore (The Well Of Sound/Freequeensee) is a multi-disciplinary artist and instrumentalist born and raised in the Northwest. With a focus in music composition, production, poetry and dance, she translates life into sound, image and movement. She senses no difference between art and existence. She creates as a practice of liberation and experiences freedom through process. Ancestral connection is a foundational element that guides and informs her work. Jennifer’s love of travel has carried her around the world, learning about various musical traditions and collecting instruments. Her international work includes music scoring and movement instruction for theater production, The Undercurrent of Silence (Capetown, South Africa 2024; 2025); composition and performance on Thuolo, a multi-artist collaborative recording at One Vibe Studio (Kisumu, Kenya 2019). Through her sonic meditation practice The Well of Sound (est. 2016), she has collaborated in community locally and nationally with numerous organizations and individuals to help calm the collective nervous system as an act of reparation. Her latest album The Let Go (2025), is available for purchase on Bandcamp and streaming on all major platforms. Currently she plays steel drums with the Seattle Steel Pan Project.
Maluhia Castillo
Maluhia Castillo is a Kanaka Maoli/Filipino musician from Hawaiʻi, raised in Washington State, whose work is rooted in community, culture, and connection. A full-time musician since 2010, he has spent much of his life creating music with people from all walks of life across the globe, with performances ranging from Carnegie Hall in New York City to streetside busking in Central Mexico.
A versatile performer and collaborator, Maluhia has worked with a wide range of artists and ensembles, including Gabriel Wolfchild, Olivia De La Cruz, Samantha Boshnack, the Seattle Metropolitan Chamber Orchestra, and the Diverse Harmony Choir. He has performed at renowned venues such as Benaroya Hall, The Triple Door, and The Moore Theatre, in addition to numerous clubs, theaters, galleries, and community-based spaces.
As a studio musician, he has recorded in legendary studios including Robert Lang Studios, London Bridge Studio, Studio Litho, and Critical Sun Studios. His work as a composer reflects a deep engagement with storytelling, identity, and the human experience.
Now living full-time on the island of Kauaʻi, Maluhia is dedicated to uplifting local communities through his music and service. He teaches in Hawaiian charter schools, performs with local musicians, and engages in social justice work, with a commitment to helping cultivate a vibrant, healthy community that honors and embodies the island’s rich history and culture.
In addition to his artistic practice, Maluhia is a dedicated educator, clinician, and coach. Recognized as a “kumu” (teacher), he is committed to cultural knowledge-sharing, mentorship, and using music as a vehicle for healing, awareness, and collective growth.
Monique Franklin
Monique Franklin, also known as Verbal Oasis, is a multidisciplinary artist, poet, performer, educator, and cultural strategist based in Seattle’s Rainier Valley. Celebrated as “The Unofficial Poet Laureate of South Seattle,” she is known for weaving poetry, music, movement, and storytelling into powerful, immersive experiences that center Black identity, healing, and collective expression.
Franklin is the founder of two community-rooted organizations: Inspired Child (est. 2006), and Inspiration Lab (est. 2022). Through Inspired Child, she has spent nearly two decades co-creating free, multigenerational arts, science, and cultural programming with Black communities across South Seattle and South King County. Through Inspiration Lab, she supports the growth and sustainability of Black artists, collectives, and arts organizations through services, research, and creative ecosystem-building.
Her work spans performance, education, and community development, with signature programs including intergenerational open mics, spoken word festivals, arts intensives, and creative learning experiences that integrate culture, technology, and wellness. She is also the creator of the Mama’z Muezz Project, a multidisciplinary body of work honoring the power and complexity of Black motherhood.
With a background in computer science, Franklin approaches her artistry and leadership with both analytical depth and creative vision. Her work serves as a catalyst for storytelling, social change, and community transformation—building spaces where Black artists and families can create, connect, and thrive.
About Bewilderment
AN OPRAH’S BOOK CLUB SELECTION
An Instant New York Times Bestseller
Shortlisted for the 2021 Booker Prize
Longlisted for the 2021 National Book Award for Fiction
Longlisted for the 2022 Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction
Description: The astrobiologist Theo Byrne searches for life throughout the cosmos while single-handedly raising his unusual nine-year-old, Robin, following the death of his wife. Robin is a warm, kind boy who spends hours painting elaborate pictures of endangered animals. He’s also about to be expelled from third grade for smashing his friend in the face. As his son grows more troubled, Theo hopes to keep him off psychoactive drugs. He learns of an experimental neurofeedback treatment to bolster Robin’s emotional control, one that involves training the boy on the recorded patterns of his mother’s brain…
With its soaring descriptions of the natural world, its tantalizing vision of life beyond, and its account of a father and son’s ferocious love, Bewilderment marks Richard Powers’s most intimate and moving novel. At its heart lies the question: How can we tell our children the truth about this beautiful, imperiled planet?
About Richard Powers
Richard Powers is a multi-award-winning American author. He lives in the Great Smoky Mountains.
His fiction often explores the effects of science and technology on humanity, and he has been nominated for the Booker Prize four times, most recently for his novel Playground in 2024. He is a MacArthur Fellow and received the National Book Award in 2006. The Overstory, which was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018, also won the Pulitzer Prize in Fiction, among other honours. Powers has previously said he is partially indebted to Booker-winner Margaret Atwood for his 2021-shortlisted novel Bewilderment, which explores the anxiety of family life on a damaged planet.
Powers’s other works include Prisoner's Dilemma (1988), The Gold Bug Variations (stories, 1991), Operation Wandering Soul (1993), Galatea 2.2 (1995), Gain (1998), Plowing the Dark (2000), The Time of Our Singing (2003), The Echo Maker (2006), Generosity (2009), and Orfeo (2014).
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